The recycled tree

Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, enjoy your holidays and some relaxing time with your families. I wish you all the best for the new year!

Cheers,
Alex

(FYI: The image was rendered with the fantastic SketchUp rendering software Twilight)

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Colors of fall

Historic House, Sunderland, MA

Orchard at Quonquont Farm

Rich bounty (my favorite)

What could this be?

You can see more of my photograhy on flickr or on my photo page.

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The Old Man

I just had to do this one. Admittedly portraits are not really my thing but I think it turned out quite okay (although a bit haunting). So how did I do it?

The kids’ playground just received a new layer of wood chips and some of them had fantastic shapes. So I took them, grabbed a camera and Photoshop and the result is above. For the curious reader the original chips are shown below.

What makes up the old man

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Just having some fun with a thermal imaging camera...

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Aviary currently offers four online imaging tools

This is a bit off topic but I just discovered aviary.com. If you haven’t checked out their image editing tools, give them a try. They are (for the most part) free, online and surprisingly powerful (for an online-only application). There is even an online community for sharing and discussing the final creations.

So what will you find in this bird nest? Apparently a whole lot of feathered friends that play nicely together:

• “Phoenix” is an image editor that not only allows for resizing and application of filters, it also has a layer-based manipulation capacity similar to Photoshop or Gimp.
• Similar layer-based editing is available in the “Raven“, a vector-based image editor like Adobe’s Illustrator.
• Extremely useful (especially for web designers) is “Toucan“, a color swatch editing tool. It has similarities with Adobe’s Kuler and allows for creating swatches based on a variety of color harmony principles. Furthermore, images can be loaded and used as a basis for new color pallettes.
• The final tool in the list is “Peacock“, which is a visual image manipulation tool that works with parametric modifiers. See the image below for an idea of how it works.

Peacock screenshot

Apparently there are more online applications in the works and there is also a “premium” subscription. Nevertheless, what’s there at this point loads fast and runs extremely stable on my machine and will undoubtedly serve as Photoshop replacement when I am not at my machine.

To give you a full prespective here, it should be mentioned that there are other online image editors, too. These are for example Adobe’s Photoshop.com, Picnik and several quick-and-easy ones like DrPic.com.

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Now the site features an abstracted notebook look with tabs on the left and stuck-on info boxes. Hope you like it.

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Another year is coming to a close. But first let’s celebrate! Enjoy your holidays and some wonderful time with your family. And all the best for the new year to you and yours!

In case you are curious: The image above is actually a composite of five individual images. All were taken on a rather mild winter night using only our family, two flashlights and a backyard.

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phtblg screen shot

I always felt that my photos aren’t properly represented either on this site or on flickr. So I decided to get myself a photoblog. One picture per screen, presented at a generous resolution should be more adequate. I am not sure if I can keep up the common one-post-per-day schedule, but I’ll send new stuff up there as soon as I have it.

So check it out at phtblg.net and let me know if you like it. Comments on the photos are always welcome.

Oh, yes… the name. It’s just playing with letters akin to “flickr”. I decided to be consistent and remove all vowels, though.

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WSS2008 Postcard Front

Given all the web work I have been doing in the recent past, it feels good every once in a while to create something that gets printed. So here’s my latest project – an announcement postcard for the 2008 Wood Structures Symposium to be held at UMass in Amherst, MA. Above is the front and below is the back of the card.

WSS2008 Postcard Back

The idea behind the design is to promote new directions in prefabricated construction while keeping history in mind. These two tendencies are illustrated on one hand by the stunning visuals of the Loblolly House by Kieran Timberlake Architects (Stephen Kieran will be keynote at the event) and the shape of the Airstream Trailer as a visual motif.

In terms of font, I went with a condensed Helvetica (the Corel version, actually) to match the verticality of the wood siding. It also allowed to squeeze a lot of information on a little postcard.

By the way – if you find the bottom of the back side a bit bare, then you’re right, it was a compromise to allow for an unflattering barcode to be printed in that space.

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